Too Legit to Quit
Stealing an Election: Violence or Fraud?
Dawn Brancati & Elizabeth Penn
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Political actors often resort to electoral violence to gain an edge over their competitors even though violence is harder to hide than fraud and more likely to delegitimize elections as a result. Existing explanations tend to analyze violence in terms of the same factors as fraud, or to treat violence as a means of last resorts given its overtness. We introduce a novel explanation that does neither, arguing that political actors often use violence for the very reason that it is hard to hide. Its overtness, we argue, allows political actors to observe whether the agents they enlist to manipulate elections for them do so and reduces these agents’ likelihood of shirking in turn. We develop our argument through a formal model showing that electoral monitors, by exacerbating problems of moral hazard (shirking), can induce actors to increasingly turn to violence and use process tracing to examine the implications of this model through the example of Egypt.
The Rise and Fall of Local Elections in China
Monica Martinez-Bravo et al.
American Economic Review, September 2022, Pages 2921-2958
Abstract:
We posit that autocrats introduce local elections when their bureaucratic capacity is low. Local elections exploit citizens' informational advantage in keeping local officials accountable, but they also weaken vertical control. As bureaucratic capacity increases, the autocrat limits the role of elected bodies to regain vertical control. We argue that these insights can explain the introduction of village elections in rural China and the subsequent erosion of village autonomy years later. We construct a novel dataset to document political reforms, policy outcomes, and de facto power for almost four decades. We find that the introduction of elections improves popular policies and weakens unpopular ones. Increases in regional government resources lead to loss of village autonomy, but less so in remote villages. These patterns are consistent with an organizational view of local elections within autocracies.
Political Imprisonment and Protest Mobilization: Evidence From the GDR
Christoph Steinert & Christoph Dworschak
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does political imprisonment influence anti-regime protest? We argue that political imprisonment facilitates rather than stifles protest. Political imprisonment is a salient indicator of arbitrary rule creating ‘embodied grievances’. It enables the formation of dissident networks within prisons, and serves as a legitimating credential for former inmates to lead resistance. These mechanisms imply that political imprisonment is a self-defeating strategy, making it easier for the opposition to overcome their collective action problem. We test our argument with subnational data from the German Democratic Republic between 1984 and 1989. To account for endogenous latent dissent, we use originally collected archival data on local surveillance operations. Exploiting daily variation in the timing of protests in 1989, we analyze the long-term impact of political imprisonment on mobilization. Results from survival analyses lend support to our hypothesized relationship. Combined with semi-structured interviews to probe our mechanisms, our findings suggest that political imprisonment increases the likelihood of protest mobilization.
Diffusion of Protests in the Arab Spring
Christopher Magee & Tansa George Massoud
International Interactions, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines how protests spread across countries in the 2011 Arab Spring. Based on the diffusion literature, we form hypotheses about the factors that influence the transmission of protests across borders. To test the hypotheses, we use an events data set measuring media reports of protests, government reforms, and acts of repression on a daily basis by country. We show that the strength of the protest movement in one country is significantly affected by protest activities in other countries over the previous 1 or 2 weeks and that protests were more likely to spread between countries that had high levels of bilateral trade. When we examine periods longer than 2 weeks, we find that protests spread across borders only when they were successful in pressuring Arab governments into enacting reforms and when the protests did not lead to government reprisals. In all our models, government repression in one country significantly stifled protests in other countries. Each country was thus significantly affected by the choices that governments in other Arab League nations made, and this interdependence meant that governments had incentives to cooperate with each other in their responses to the Arab Spring protests.
Revolution, State Building, and the Great Famine in China
Mingxing Liu, Victor Shih & Dong Zhang
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
In a strong authoritarian state, what mechanisms hold political elites accountable and contain the state’s predatory tendencies? We examine China’s Great Famine of 1958–1961 to understand the variation of predatory behaviors across Chinese provinces. By exploring the Chinese Communist Revolution history and probing into over four hundred biographies of political elites in the newly founded communist state, we first document the revolutionary legacies on state building particularly political power configurations at the provincial level. We then employ a generalized difference-in-differences design and find that local representation — the extent to which local cadres were represented in the provincial authorities — enhanced provincial leaders’ accountability to the general public and thus was associated with lower mortality rates, whereas central connections — the political ties between provincial leaders and powerful political elites in the central state — reinforced the accountability to higher-level political leaders and were associated with higher mortality rates.
Authoritarian or Simply Disillusioned? Explaining Democratic Skepticism in Central and Eastern Europe
Kiran Auerbach & Bilyana Petrova
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Survey research has revealed that post-communist citizens are skeptical towards democracy. Despite a substantial body of literature that has researched the origins and determinants of these attitudes, consensus has not yet emerged. A major challenge has been to distinguish between individual support for democracy as an ideal political regime and satisfaction with the way democracy is practiced in one’s country. Using structural equation modeling with latent variables, we improve measurement validity and account for feedback effects to better understand the relationship between these attitudes. Consistent with our performance-based theory, we find that positive assessments of political performance drive normative support for democracy. The impact of satisfaction with democracy on democratic support suggests that we should not rush to view post-communist citizens' mindset as anomalous and inherently anti-democratic. Rather, post-communist skepticism of democracy might be generalized to contexts characterized by flawed implementation and unmet expectations of this form of government.
Biophysiological Risk-Factors for Political Violence
Katherine Sawyer
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do individuals engage in violence against the state? This research investigates the biological and environmental determinants of individual-level participation in political violence through the use of a Candidate Gene Association, gene-environment interaction, study. Existing research has demonstrated that variation in a specific gene (called MAO-A) is associated with aggression. However, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the interaction with the environment; specifically, the ways in which repressive political environments differentially incite acts of violence. Using original genetic, survey and experimental data collected on participants and non-participants of political violence, I find that under conditions of political repression, individuals with the low MAO-A genetic variant are significantly more likely to engage in acts of political violence. By examining both the genetic and environmental factors influencing political violence, the results make a significant contribution to our understanding of how genetic variation may lead to violence.
Trading Favours through the Revolving Door: Evidence from China’s Primary Land Market
Ting Chen et al.
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
By matching data on land transactions in China’s primary land market with detailed curriculum-vitae of board directors in publicly listed firms, we identify a pattern of ‘revolving door’ exchanges between local officials and firms. The officials discounted the price of land which they sold to the said firms, and were subsequently rewarded with board appointments upon retirement. Specifically, these ‘client-officials’ are three times as likely to be recruited by the ‘patron-firms’ as board directors and enjoy a salary that is 23% higher and 81% more company shares by comparison with directors who did not help firms to secure cheap land deals. All of these, however, are conditional on patron-firms being able to receive a price discount, which averaged 19.4% when they purchased them in normal times. However, when client-officials were constrained from providing a price discount during a surprise audit, the likelihood of client-officials recruited as board directors was halved, with the price discount and extra compensation received by the patrons and clients respectively vanishing altogether. By providing evidence of the reciprocal benefits received by both parties, we demonstrate that the revolving door is used as a ‘payment’ rather than a ‘connection’ device in the Chinese context.
Can Western Donors Constrain Repressive Governments? Evidence from Debt Relief Negotiations in Africa
Brett Carter
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is limited evidence that reliance on foreign aid from Western donors compels repressive governments to embrace democratic reforms and respect citizens’ rights. However, donors have another, potentially more powerful source of financial leverage: debt relief. This paper exploits two features of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt relief initiative, launched by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in 1996, to probe whether Western leverage has constrained repression across Africa. First, the Bretton Woods institutions initiated debt relief negotiations with virtually all African governments. Second, many recipients were in power long before HIPC negotiations began and remained after they concluded. Using a differences-in-differences estimator, I show that the daily rate of repression fell by between 10% and 30% during debt relief negotiations. This effect holds across autocracies and democracies, and during periods of sustained protests. When debt crises were more severe, debt relief negotiations were even more constraining.
The Emperor’s Geography - City Locations, Nature, and Institutional Optimisation
Christian Düben & Melanie Krause
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
The emergence of cities in specific locations depends on both geographical features (such as elevation and proximity to rivers) and institutional factors (such as centrality within an administrative region). In this paper, we analyse the importance of these factors at different levels of the urban hierarchy. To do so, we exploit a unique data set on the location of cities of different status in imperial China from 221 BCE to 1911 CE, a geographically diverse empire with a long history of centralised rule. Developing a stylised theoretical model, we combine econometrics with machine learning techniques. Our results suggest that the higher a city is in the urban hierarchy, the less important are local geographical features compared to institutional factors. At the lower end of the scale, market towns without government responsibilities are most strongly shaped by geographical characteristics. We also find evidence that many cities of political importance in imperial times still enjoy a special status nowadays, underlining the modern relevance of these historical factors.